Yes! Social media marketing for Financial Institutions should be posting memes, throwbacks, and other off-brand social media posts. Ditch those brand and reputation worries because when it comes to engaging on social media, your product and service posts alone just aren't going to cut it.
Often our clients will ask what is the importance of engagement posts (memes, throwbacks, etc.) for their financial institution's social media marketing success. The obvious answer is that social media is MEANT to be fun and engaging. People go there to be entertained and interact with friends and family!
We had a client that wanted to test this theory and decided to share content that was less focused on engagement and more focused on financial products and branded content. This change in strategy had some pretty expensive consequences.
Over three months time, the post frequency and the type of content shared on Facebook and Instagram shifted while the budget stayed marginally the same. In other words, these results are driven solely from a drop in overall reach and people not engaging with content as often.
Also, these are results from 3 consecutive months. The first month was the original strategy and months two and three, the posts were shared mostly financial specific content.
Average 28-Day Engagement Rate
| Month One: | 118.68% |
| Month Two: | 40.91% |
| Month Three: | 26.01% |
Daily Engaged Users
| Month One: | 6,602 |
| Month Two: | 2,238 |
| Month Three: | 1,913 |
That is an engagement decline of OVER 92% in just 3 months and 4,689 LESS daily engaged users per month! Furthermore, with the engagement audience shrinking, paid website click ads started showing fewer conversions even with an increased budget.
Website Click Ads
| Cost Per Click: | Budget: | Total Clicks: | |
| Month One: | $0.84 | $509.62 | 608 |
| Month Two: | $0.96 | $544.19 | 578 |
| Month Three: | $1.08 | $588.08 | 546 |
As you can see from month one to three, the cost went up 33%, the budget went up 13% and the actual clicks STILL spiraled down by 62 clicks!
What we took away from these results? If you're not engaging your social media audiences with entertaining content, and simply post content about yourself, your products, and your services - no matter how helpful and valuable you believe they are - your social media marketing spend start to look like this:
Money in the garbage.
Increasing engagement with entertaining posts is a tactical approach to an effective social media strategy. It results in the ability to deliver product and service messaging cost-effectively. The more that people engage with your posts, the more often Facebook shows them your content, which means you can cycle in posts about products and services and they will be delivered to consumers, for free or at a lower cost.
Facebook, in particular, is ranking its perceived value of content against all other content to determine what it should display in a person’s news feed.
Facebook determines value based on prior engagement and delivers content from a company page to the people who interact with it the most. If a member, customer or fan is consistently engaging with your content, Facebook will continue to show them your posts.
Right now, video is KING in the social media world. Post fun, short videos of your staff or branch. It could be a boomerang of bank tellers cheersing their morning coffee, or a short video tour of a branch. If you don't have a video of a branch, try a funny gif and put a financial spin on it in the caption.
Trying to understand 'budget' 😆
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It has been proven that people who frequently engage are more likely to click on sponsored content (ads) from that company because they’re familiar with the brand.
You don’t want to become just another company with a paid ad interrupting consumer social feeds.
I know for some institutions it can be difficult posting “fun” content on social media, I understand that feeling. However, in order to be successful, you must play by Facebook's rules. They have undergone many algorithm changes in order to ensure an enjoyable Facebook experience and have made it clear they favor content that users consider valuable and engage with.
The best part is... you can get these engagement results with just a few dollars a day! You just need to have the right content targeted to the right audience.